2005 Education Trust National Conference

The rapid growth of the Latino population in districts large and small, urban and rural, requires that educators be prepared to take steps to close the gaps in achievement between Latino students and their peers. This session provides the latest national demographic and achievement data for Latino students and then turns to experts for advice on how to reverse stagnant achievement trends. Our experts represent the broad community engaged in improving education for Latino students.

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Latinos represent the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority group in the United States; but public education has been slow to respond to the needs of Latinos, and the achievement gap for Latinos is a crisis that needs to be addressed. Fortunately, we also know that Latino students perform at high levels when they are taught to high levels and when they receive their fair share of opportunities. In this session, we are going to analyze the achievement of Latinos in the nation and what can be done to close the achievement gap.

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Recent state and national data tell a compelling story. Student achievement in elementary and middle grades is improving, and gaps are closing. But the same is not true in our high schools. Gaps today are wider at that level than they were a decade ago. And our high school completion rates, once number one in the world, now rank 17th. In her opening address, Education Trust Director Kati Haycock will review the latest results at all levels of education and talk about what we can learn from the experiences of schools, districts, colleges, and states around the country.

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How do we determine significant outcomes for dual enrollment or credit-based transition programs? What are satisfactory short- and long-term goals? This presentation addresses strategies to reach students early by introducing them to a variety of courses and workshops. Joining the country’s largest school district with the largest urban postsecondary system, the College Now Program at the City University of New York (CUNY) serves students in more than 70 percent of NYC public high schools.

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From making policy to working with individual students and parents, structures and systems are being reinvented in the Santa Monica-Malibu (California) Unified School District. Santa Monica High School, with an enrollment of 3,500 students, was redesigned into six small learning communities. The Board of Education adopted a controversial “gift policy” that uses a weighted formula to redistribute a portion of funds raised by PTAs and other organizations throughout the district to be used for support, intervention, and remediation.

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It’s one of the thorniest issues confronting high schools today: How do we educate students who come in way behind? These high school principals know how to do just that. North Carolina’s Jack Britt High School and Farmville Central High School serve high populations of African-American and low-income students and boast strong track records of helping struggling ninth-graders achieve higher-than-expected academic growth by the 11th grade.

Learn how the Chichester School District in Boothwyn, PA, closed the achievement gap in reading with a unified assessment system that motivates students to engage in daily independent reading in school and at home. After one year, higher-poverty first-graders outperformed higher-income students in other schools. Examine results and identify how to increase student achievement and proficiency levels on high-stakes tests with implementation of this saturation model of success-level reading.

We have more evidence than ever before that it is teachers who are the primary factor in closing the achievement gap. We also know that it is low-income and/or minority students who are least likely to be ensured access to high-quality teachers. In places where teachers are producing gains with students, we know little about their instructional practices and how they go about achieving results. But we are working on it!

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This session will show how a large school district, a community college, and a university partnered to share student achievement data and track students through high school and into college. Participants will see the effect this multi-year study has had on high school course-taking patterns, success in college, and policies.

This session introduces a new model for school leadership in which a small group of school-community leaders facilitates a vision-based, data-driven, and systemic school improvement process. Decision making is shared with all administrators, all teachers, all students, parents, business representatives, and community members.

Administrators of Fort Wayne Community Schools’ K-2 Project, a successful early reading intervention, share how multiple data sources contribute to its design, evaluation, and effectiveness. The project includes the use of Indiana Division of Exceptional Learners Continuous Improvement Monitoring, research-based reading recommendations, and DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills). The intervention, which provides targeted reading instruction for students with disabilities and other students at-risk, has had promising early results.

University Park Campus School is a small, urban school in which 75 percent of the students speak English as a second language. Most students enter seventh grade reading well below grade level, but by 10th grade they all pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) -- most at proficient and advanced levels. June Eressy, principal and founding English teacher of the University Park Campus School, offers a “how-to” guide to literacy across the curriculum to promote universal student achievement.

The mission of New Leaders for New Schools is to foster high-academic achievement for every child by attracting, preparing, and supporting the next generation of outstanding school leaders for our nation’s urban public schools. The organization focuses on closing the achievement gap with excellent principals and school directors. This presentation describes the components necessary to foster direct and catalytic impact on student achievement through effective school leadership.

High school graduation is the bare minimum needed for successful participation in the workforce, the economy, and society as a whole. But educators, parents, and policymakers in almost every state do not have accurate data on how many students are leaving high school without a diploma. This lack of accurate information is harmful to all students, especially the low-income and minority students who we know often struggle the most in high school.

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Studies say high-performance schools “sound, walk, and talk alike.” What are the traits of high performers no matter what the levels, locations, or demographics? What do they do with data? How are new teachers treated? What’s different about relationships among stakeholders in high performers? How is technology used? Have feelings about academic goals and testing changed as a result of accountability reforms?

The panel will present the results of a study conducted by the Education Trust that looked at two sets of schools, one that achieved average growth and one that achieved better-than-expected growth with ninth-graders who entered behind academically. We wanted to know what the second group did to get students on track to graduate and prepared to meet postsecondary requirements.

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Working as leaders and advocates, school counselors can use data to remove barriers to student achievement and help students gain access to a rigorous, quality education. In this interactive workshop, participants hear how school counselors are working to help schools raise student achievement. Participants will also use the Education Trust’s Making Data Work: A Parent and Community Guide to learn how to use data to identify and eliminate the institutional barriers that keep many students of color and students from low-income families from achieving at high-academic levels.

This session will focus on the development and application of a research framework that can support evidence-driven reform of teacher preparation in institutions of higher education. Presenters will discuss a standard research framework which “maps” key practices in teacher preparation that are hypothesized to affect the quality and effectiveness of university-based preparation programs. Presenters will offer examples of the application of this research paradigm for improving both near-term and long-term outcomes for teachers prepared in university-based programs.

Public Agenda believes an important key to successful education reform is to engage the stakeholders--to let the community in--so they provide input that can shape policy in critical ways, and so they develop ownership for that policy’s success.

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Five years ago, Dayton’s Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary School, in St. Paul, Minnesota, was widely acknowledged as the worst school in the city. Almost all the students are from low income homes and nine out of 10 students were not meeting state standards. But in 2005, almost eight out of 10 fifth-graders met state math standards. Presenters will describe the school redesign effort that aligned instruction to high standards and helped produce significant gains among all groups of students.

Seven years ago, Pueblo District 60 in Pueblo, CO, had some of the lowest reading scores in the state. Nearly 60 percent of students are minority and qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, so few expected the district to significantly improve reading achievement. In 1998, the district began a partnership with Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes and set out to raise achievement for all their students and close the achievement gap.

Leadership excellence has been the driving force behind improved student achievement at Lancaster High School. A visionary administrator with the knowledge and background to support school-wide reorganization for student achievement, a nationally affiliated education specialist, and highly qualified teacher leaders have improved student academic achievement, particularly for minority and disadvantaged students at Lancaster High School.

Teachers are one of the most important ingredients in closing the gaps that separate different groups of young Americans. Yet our systems of public education continue to assign low-income students and students of color disproportionate numbers of inexperienced and under-prepared teachers. Moreover, we don’t provide teachers the support systems they need to make them want to remain in schools that serve poor and minority students.

Battelle for Kids, a non-profit organization created to champion improved student achievement in Ohio, will provide a conceptual overview of value-added analysis and share information about Ohio’s value-added pilot – the largest value-added pilot in the country. Learn how Ohio is making the shift in its accountability system, from a system based only on achievement measures to one based on progress (growth) AND achievement measures. Presenters will also share success stories about how schools are using the information derived from value-added to improve student achievement.

This presentation will describe a highly successful, teacher-created four-year looping program that resulted in systemic district change in a diverse, suburban school. By changing the structure in which they taught, these teachers were able to teach “smarter, not harder.” Through multi-grade collaboration, implementing research-based reading and math programs, and direct instruction in the strategies necessary to be “test savvy,” the “double loop” promoted a phenomenal increase in student achievement.

At Frankford Elementary School, all third- and fifth-graders met or exceeded state standards in reading this year and roughly nine in 10 met or exceeded state standards in math. Frankford Elementary is a rural school in Delaware, with a diverse student body that is almost evenly split among African-American, White, and Latino students; three out of four students are low-income. Presenters in this session will describe how careful use of data in constructing individual learning plans drives thoughtful instruction so that all students can reach high levels.

Recent Education Trust–West reports have exposed a pervasive, but hidden, inequity in California’s schools – the amount of money high-poverty and high-minority schools are shortchanged when it comes to school spending on teachers. This session will focus on the findings of these reports and will examine California’s hidden teacher-spending gaps throughout the state, within districts and at individual school sites. We will introduce an online data tool, with which visitors can look up teacher-spending gaps for nearly every school in California. Dr.

Standards in Practice (SIP) is an on-going, diagnostic professional-development tool that focuses teachers on improving the rigor and relevance of the assignments they give their students, while at the same time diagnosing students’ strengths and weaknesses. SIP is a six-step process that helps teachers provide targeted instruction to students, resulting in improving student achievement. The goal of SIP is to ensure that assignments are standards-based, on grade level, and to ask students to apply or analyze complex content and ideas.

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Participants will learn and discuss their district’s collaborative structures and strategies based on North East ISD’s “A-B-C” plan of building capacity for leading, learning, and teaching. The “A-B-C” themes for instructional improvement are: Accountability (Aligning Instruction and Assessment), Beliefs (Powerful and Equitable Learning for All Students) and Connections (Connecting Leading, Learning, and Teaching).

Often, educators do their school improvement planning without fi rst analyzing data from their school. In this session, Education Trust Director Kati Haycock will share some techniques for analyzing school-level data in ways that help focus attention on achievement gaps and the opportunity or practice gaps that give rise to them.

Presenter:
Kati Haycock, Director, Education Trust, Washington, DC

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Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer prize-winning former reporter for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning producer and correspondent, is one of the country’s most distinguished journalists. In “Making School Work,” his sixth prime-time mini-series for PBS, Smith turned his attention to the schools and districts across the country that have improved academic performance for poor and minority students.